How old is the oldest person youve known?
On a sunny urban American plaza, kindly professor Dan Gilbert
asks everyday folks to place a sticker, affix a magnet, paint a
wall, or pull a ribbon to together dramatize the gulf between
the retirement Americans imagine and whats actuarially in
store. Cognitive biases, left unchecked, lead people to the
predictable catastrophe of savings running out before their
years do. Yet the problem isnt ignorance. Prudential
knows within a normal distribution when were all going to
die, and how much well spend arriving there in comfort.
The challenge is convincing us.

Its tough, says Colin McConnell,
Prudential Financials chief brand officer. People
always refer to this as a low-engagement category  and I
bristle at that. McConnell has also changed that, or at
least made Prudential an exception to the generally limp and
clichéd genre of financial services advertising. A
lot of these totems of retirement have been used for years
 think yachts and Adirondack chairs, McConnell
says, seated in his roomy office at Prudentials Newark,
New Jersey, headquarters.

Swap Ask your doctor for Not guaranteed by
the FDIC, and a Viagra commercial becomes a typical
retirement product ad: frisky heterosexuals of a certain age
really enjoying life.

The industrys well-tread ways of depicting retirement
underwhelmed McConnell, who has been in charge of
Prudentials advertising since 2009. The bar, as he sees
it, was low, but the material inherently strong. The
story were trying to tell is emotional; its
intellectual; its about life, he says. Why
cant we be interesting about life? So in 2010 he
challenged his team at Prudential and its outside ad agency,
Droga5, to just find a new way to say it  the
narrative of life post-work. And I think we
did.

During halftime of the 2012 Super Bowl, with the New York
Giants midway to victory, the largest U.S. media market paused
for Linda Gutherie, a widow on her first day of retirement.
Its kind of hard to make decisions by yourself all
of a sudden, she says, when youve been making
them with someone else for 35 years. Gutherie looks like
a real person because she is one, McConnell says, with khaki
shorts and glasses and walls crowded with family portraits.
I guess theres something in me thats always
been strong, she says, now naturally lit in front of a
weeping willow. Music rises. On a navy screen, a phrase
appears: Insuring that life goes on is what life
insurance is all about. The Prudential logo appears.

The Day One campaign was the first iteration of
Prudentials radical documentary-style retelling of the
retirement story. The stickers, magnets, Harvard professor Dan
Gilbert, and millions upon millions of YouTube views came next.
Even as Day One was out there,
McConnell says, we were working to crack the code of data
visualization and behavioral insights. They looked at
other ostensibly dry categories and sought out viral hits.
Where did someone get 2 million views on something you
wouldnt expect? Then we reversed-engineered. A TED
Talk on population growth by global health professor Hans
Rosling proved one source of inspiration, according to
McConnell. We looked at five or six core behavioral
insights, and added a social element, because it was clear that
this campaign should be about them, the community, not about
us. I remember looking at the storyboard for stickers and
thinking, This is going to be the greatest commercial in
financial services for a long time.

Which isnt to say there werent doubters. Early
on, McConnells team shared footage from the Day
One shoots with Prudentials other stakeholders.
It was polarizing, he remembers. Marketing
loved it. But distribution initially said, Wheres
the 1-800 number? Wheres the website? Having
spent the bulk of his career at Prudential, McConnell has
earned a long rope from higher-ups and loyalty from below, a
colleague says. The bold campaign might have crashed and
burned, but Prudential was willing to support its takeoff.

Apprehension from the sales team evaporated after a client
focus group viewed  and loved  some early cuts,
according to Christine Marcks, president of Prudential
Retirement. Now the campaigns are one of the factors that
attract talent. People are proud to say they work here.
Even the sales team? Theyre always asking,
Whats next?